PRESS RELEASE

April 30, 2007 (EIRNS)The May/June 2007 edition of the New York Council on Foreign Relations' journal, Foreign Affairs, has published an open call for the end of sovereign nation-state control over currency. In a signed article by Benn Steil, Director of International Economics at the CFR, titled "The End of National Currency," the Council, in effect, endorsed the end of economic sovereignty and demanded the total capitulation of all nations, rich and poor, to unbridled globalization.

In the essay, Steil argued that the solution to currency crises "is not to return to a mythical past of monetary sovereignty, with governments controlling local interest and exchange rates in blissful ignorance of the rest of the world. Governments must let go of the fatal notion that nationhood requires them to make and control the money used in their territory. National currencies and global markets simply do not mix; together they make a deadly brew of currency crises and geopolitical tension and create ready pretexts for damaging protectionism. In order to globalize safely, countries should abandon monetary nationalism and abolish unwanted currencies, the source of much of today's instability."

If there was any doubt that Steil was calling for a new form of super-imperial domination in a post-Westphalia, post-sovereign nation-state utopian world, he made that point clear, by citing the late 19th century period, leading into World War I, as the high point of earlier globalizationprecisely the period when the British Empire was at its apex. "The lessons of gold-based globalization in the nineteenth century simply must be relearned," Steil wrote, "....Since economic development outside the process of globalization is no longer possible, countries should abandon monetary nationalism. Governments should replace national currencies with the dollar or the euro, or, in the case of Asia, collaborate to produce a new multinational currency over a comparably large and economically diversified area.... Most of the world's smaller and poorer countries would clearly be best off unilaterally adopting the dollar or the euro, which would enable their safe and rapid integration into global financial markets. Latin American countries should dollarize; eastern European countries and Turkey, euroize." Steil's final warning: If governments, including the United States fail to take his advice, "the market may privatize money on its own."

Briefed on the Steil policy statement, Lyndon LaRouche denounced it as dangerous folly. LaRouche described the Steil proposal for a "trilateral" division of a one-world monetary dictatorship as an attempt to revive the "Persian Model" of a global empire, divided between regional powers. In the original Persian case, the proposal was for a division between an eastern and western empire. Now, LaRouche warned, the CFR is promoting a "trilateral" division of the world, along precisely the Persian Model of imperial oligarchical rule. LaRouche drew the parallel to the Persian campaign to destroy Athens at the close of the Pelloponesian Wars and the present schemes, and also pointed to the parallels with the Venetian model of a private financier oligarchy ruling the world through control over debt and commerce.